Don’t get me wrong, I like Lallana. He’s been one of the more important cogs in Southampton’s season, and I think he’ll be good if he gets a chance to play at the World Cup in Brazil. But for £25m?

Armed with my assumption that there are a bunch of Bananas dotted around Europe, I set out to see whether it was true. One of the cool things about football statistics these days is that we’re starting to get enough information to do player comparisons and similarity scores.

By plugging Lallana’s important stats into a database filled with Opta data, we’re now able to find out if there are many players who produce like Lallana or just a few. If there are many, then £25m is a pretty silly sum of money to throw around. If there are few, however, maybe £25m actually makes sense.

For reference, this is what Lallana has looked like this season in mostly an Attacking Midfielder role.

Surprisingly, there actually aren’t that many players in Europe’s big leagues with Lallana’s production. He’s not overwhelmingly good at any one thing, but he’s relatively good at all sorts of things, and this type of all-rounder is fairly rare.

Sidney Sam
from Leverkusen is another one that ticks the boxes, but Schalke activated his release clause in January for a measly €2.5m euros. Two words: good business.

What about more realistic targets though? Well, Julian Draxler
, who Arsenal were rumoured to be after in January, fits the bill for his 2013 season. He’s a brilliant young player and one of the best dribblers in Europe now, but his previously rumoured price tag of €35-40 caused the Gunners to baulk. €25m might just be enough to get Schalke to part with his services. (For the record, I think he’s probably best as a second striker and could potentially develop into one of the best scorers in Europe if played centrally, but we’ll have to wait and see on that.)

Inter’s Ricardo Alvarez
, 26, is a year older than Lallana, but good enough to do well in that role and might be ready to play for a Champions League team. Fiorentina’s Juan Cuadrado
is another player from Italy whose name has been hot on the rumour mill for a year now
. He’s been tremendous in Serie A and is the same age as Lallana, but would not be a player who would come cheap.

Claudio Villa

Tricky Ricky: Alvarez fits Adam Lallana's profile

When looking at more discount options, the place to start is Atletico Madrid’s Diego, who is 29. He’s out of contract this summer, and has been an excellent offensive player for years, but might be looking to stay in Spain. Beyond him, I would take a close look at Kevin Kampl
of Red Bull Salzburg (age 23), Diego Perotti
of Sevilla (age 25, and currently on loan in Argentina so waaaaay under the radar), and most especially Celta Vigo youngster Rafinha
. Rafinha is only 21 and has potential future star written all over him. He’s also Spanish, so a work permit would not be an issue. The only problem is he's on loan from Barcelona but they're so stocked in midfield that it would be rude not to at least ask the question.

Three more points before I sign off. The first is that Liverpool already have two players who hit high on Lallana similarity scores in Raheem Sterling
and Philippe Coutinho
, so when talking about increasing squad depth for the Champions League, the Lallana interest suddenly makes a lot of sense.

The second is that Southampton do already have a player whose statistical production looks like Lallana in Gaston Ramirez
. Gaston’s issue is that he’s not efficient enough with the ball right now, but that should hopefully improve with some maturity and more playing time.

And finally, it’s probably worth noting that Spurs signed a statistically better version of Lallana last summer… and then due to manager peculiarity and/or injury issues, barely played him all season. Maybe Liverpool should check with Daniel Levy and see if he’s looking for someone to take Erik Lamela
off his hands.

At a small discount, of course.

Say £25M?

All data provided by Opta Sports, official data partner of MirrorFootball